The Space of the Commons: Dheisheh Refugee Camp

By Alison Hugill and Dan Dorocic

Hannah Arendt’s essay ‘Labour,
Work, Action,’ published in 1958, produces a definition of action and public
space that is decidedly connected to a politically liberal-democratic tradition.
Lacking any materialist nuance and explicitly anti-Marxist, Arendt’s treatise
proposes that the actions of individuals – their capacity to begin ever anew
within a plurality of beings - is what distinguishes them and reveals the
meaning of each human life. Every man’s words and deeds form a part of their
personal (and thus implicitly social) narrative. Arendt’s depreciation of
labour, both productive and reproductive, allows her to perform a theoretical
reversal of Marx: instead, she privileges action as the main pillar of the
human condition, arguing that labour relates to mere biological life and
necessity.

From a Marxist perspective, it is
clear that capitalist social relations are deeply entwined with each layer of
Arendt’s “human condition” and, while they may manifest most transparently in
the realm of labour, they are inextricable from individual pursuits in terms of
action and they permeate modern notions of both public and private space. In
reality, the so-called “public realm” (the space of action in Arendt’s reading)
is not free or independent from state or economic imperatives. On the contrary,
the public realm, as we now know it, is saturated with these concerns.

This paper will examine the fraught
question of public space in the Palestinian context, with particular reference
to on-going projects in the Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem in the West
Bank. Public space and participatory spatial initiatives will be investigated
to understand their relevance and potential in this context. The Arendtian idea of “unique and free individuals”
working on a collective project is problematic here. Instead, many refugees
living in Dheisheh are seeking to actively build common political spaces that
exist independent of institutional or governmental bodies, individual economic pursuits or the apparatus of occupation. In particular, a group within Campus in Camps (an
educational and project-oriented program developed out of the Camp Improvement
Program) is interrogating the ‘Unbuilt’ spaces in Dheisheh.[1] Participants have isolated several sites within Dheisheh that have the
potential to be transformed for collective use.

Following the work of the Decolonizing Architecture
Art Residency (DAAR) and Campus in Camps, we will position the case of the
public realm and action within the theoretical and political framework of the
“commons”[2] and "dissensus"[3], against
traditional, liberal and neoliberal understandings of the political ‘space of
appearance.’